Memnison Journal

Vee-ecks has an entertaining review of the Sarah Palin report.   Recommended.

And then they get like every state official they’re friends with to harass Monegan over the same shit, and Monegan has to keep telling these people over and over “I can’t even discuss any of this with you. Do you have any idea how exposed just having a phone call like this leaves both of us?” He has to tell the state head of personnel this. Multiple times. And the Attorney General.

At this point, I have to say: Mike Wooten should seriously think about moving to a new state, because I don’t think Sarah Palin’s getting that job she wants next month and I don’t think most people back home are super happy with her, either. Those increasingly bitter Palins are going to be following you around supermarkets and calling your boss every time you fart and putting up anonymous fliers calling you a pedophile for the next forty years. I hear North Dakota’s nice if you like it cold and unpopulated.

Federal prosecutors are pumping him for information, now that he’s got serious time to look forward to at the federal pen on corruption charges; the people who will probably be hurt by this are Blago and some of the statehouse boys in Springfield.  Doesn’t bother me a bit.  Can’t stand Blago.  Not fond of Daley, either.

The Anchorage Daily News reports this morning that the State Legislature had to step in and pass a law because of Sarah Palin and her hand-picked Wasilla police chief’s treatment of rape victims, forbidding police departments from charging rape victims for medical exams post-rape. Nowhere else in Alaska was this done but Palin’s Wasilla.  Details after the cut.

If Sarah Palin tries to tell you she did in and refused the money for the bridge-to-nowhere in Alaska, she’s lying to you.  And if she tells you she’s a hardnosed fiscal conservative and as against earmarks as John McCain, she’s lying to you some more.

From USA Today - states aren’t hanging on to DNA evidence, due to cost issues.

The BBC is reporting about a family funeral home business (two parlors and a crematorium) on on the US east coast that was outdoing Burke and Hare in selling the dead bodies that came into the place:

Mastromarino’s company, Biomedical Tissue Services, took body parts from funeral homes in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Among the corpses plundered was that of BBC presenter Alistair Cooke.

In Philadelphia, he paid the Garzone brothers and their partner, James McCafferty, more than $245,000 for at least 244 bodies between February 2004 and October 2005.

After buying the corpses, Mastromarino would send a “cutting crew”, led by former nurse Lee Cruceta, to Philadelphia to dissect the bodies.

The body parts were sold around the country for surgical procedures including knee and hip replacements, as well as dental implants.

Gack.

I’ve posted here about a kid who was killed by a drunk driver outside of Dayton; the guy was convicted of aggravated vehicular homicide.  He was just sentenced to five years in prison.

Very good article that explains the real limits of Chinese power down the road.  Here’s a mix of his points and some of my thoughts on the matter:

• Cheap labor and fair access to markets is about their main strengths.  Quality is not as important if the manufacturers can slide by.
• Labor is starting to price itself out of the basement, and the real dirt-cheap producers are looking elsewhere - like Vietnam.  In some cases, the manufacturers are finding out that the endless parade of people in government wanting a cut of the action are getting to be endless.  And expensive.
• Chinese aren’t innovating, they’re just cheaping things out. 99% of what they’re doing is innovated somewhere else, in regards to true innovation.
• They’re depending on massive, continuous, unending growth. This is impossible. Eventually, the growth is going to hit a limit.
• The Chinese - both people and manufacturers - are consuming huge quantities of raw materials, stripping their own country bare and polluting the heck out of it. Long before they’re done producing, the quality of life and the lack of arable, unpolluted land is going to smother them.  Or upset the masses enough to say enough-is-enough.
• Health care is China is absurdly bad, and this and the pollution is going to catch up with them.
• The demographics are going to hell in a handbasket. Because of the one-child policy and the way it’s been implemented, there’s going to be a lot of unmarried guys unemployed and looking for work and women that aren’t available, and there’s going to be a ton of elderly with no visible means of support (in the hundreds of millions, reaching a third of a billion in the not-too-distant future). There’s no pensions as a rule or Social Security in China - you depend on your kids. What kids?
• Too much corruption means that there’s too much of a leakage on all costs - you put X amount into a business or a government project, and too much of it gets trickled off and too little gets done in an effective manner. This will only work out so long as the spigot is full and juicy. If it ever dies down, watch out.  The inner contract between The Party and the people is that the gravy keeps rolling in, and the party controls things. 
• Too much government control and corruption in government is a situation ready for a long-term collapse and a drying up of further innovations in favor of cash cows to keep the bribes flowing.
• The government is subsidizing a lot of things, such as gasoline and diesel, but this becomes a constant drain that can never be cut off without open revolts in the streets.

The Department of Justice’s Inspector General has announced today that it found ’systemic’ violations of the law in the hiring and firing of staff attorneys in the DOJ; people who were fired because they ’seemed’ to be gay, people who were specifically not hired or were fired because they ’seemed’ to be ‘liberal’ or someone in their family might be, and so on.

About a month ago, I posted on this matter, and suggested that aside of criminal prosecution of the people who did this, cleaning out the people hired this way would be a good idea. I think this gives that notion a whole lot more impetus.

There’s been a number of notes in the news recently to the direction of – well, Bush would far rather have McCain as his successor because McCain would never go after Bushco for all of the mopery, dopery and violations of federal law that the present ‘whatever you say boss’ Justice Department would never look into. Of course, right now, it looks like McCain is hopeless, so the idea is – hey, why don’t we pardon ourselves in advance? What a concept!

In a recent posting, I discussed a drunk driver who hit and killed a kid getting off the school bus - in the kid’s front yard.  A Dayton, Ohio jury found the dude guilty of aggravated vehicular homicide, and another such case is now up in their courts, about a hit and run where the driver was high on heroin, hit the pedestrian rather spectacularly, and hid the car.  The pedestrian died after six weeks of agony in the hospital.

There’s a trial going on in Dayton, Ohio (my hometown) about a drunk driver who was arguing with his girlfriend while going down a narrow country road at over 100 miles an hour. He came up on a school bus that was parked with its lights on after letting off a 17-year-old kid at his house. The entire bus full of kids saw the car go out of control and go airborne at 103 miles an hour, nailing the kid in his own driveway and sending him flying 65 feet through the air and up 13 feet into a tree. The driver’s got a long criminal record for drunk driving, assault and theft. Needless to say, the kid died and the drunk is on trial, with everyone at the scene (including the girlfriend) testifying against him….with a five year sentence and a $10,000 fine possible with a conviction.

…the vacant lot down the street, in front of the neighbors? Three idiots decide to strip and go at it in a back yard of a local home (presently vacant), and the locals called the cops.  One of the three guys is the principal of a Catholic high school…

Guys, I understand many things, but doing it in a strange back yard for the hots of it all is way dumb.   And no, I was not the guy who arranged all this. As the cops said, “They didn’t use common sense.  That’s very, very unfortunate.”

Thanks for letting me know.  And for nailing that one with the stripes.

Article on a woman who had been steaming for two years over a one-night-stand with a guy (who never called her back afterwards) and enlisted her new boyfriend and his buggies to help her with a plan; she would lure the guy off to a motel and then the others would hold him down and brand him…

Caban’s lawyer, James Friedman said, “She’s a good kid, despite the picture painted of her, who exercised poor judgment and got herself into a bad situation. She is not the monster the prosecution made her out to be.”

Ooh, good one on the poor judgement part.